The Skills Fiction Teaches Best

Yes, you can learn from reading fiction

Don’t get me wrong—I love non-fiction books, too.

But I’ve heard the refrain “You can’t learn from fiction” too many times not to pick up my (metaphorical) pen and write about it.

Here’s my reasoning: a love for fiction can lead to the development of a powerful level of compassion and empathy.

The truth is that soft skills are typically more difficult to develop than hard skills.

Why? With hard skills, even with extraordinarily complex subjects, we can grab a textbook and study, study, study (and/or practice, practice, practice) until we’ve mastered the skill.

It’s not easy per se, but there’s a roadmap. A playbook for how exactly to gain the expertise.

Soft skills are different. They are more nuanced and more connected to our identity and personality, often taking years—if not a lifetime—to develop.

Compassion and empathy are two of the most important soft skills humans can acquire, and I believe they can come naturally over years of reading stories. Fiction has a way of teaching us about ourselves and other people in a way that no “real world” book can.

How?

By allowing us to immerse ourselves in the stories of diverse people—diverse made up people—we are inadvertently dropping our judgments and practicing compassion for others who, in real life, we may never have chosen to lend it to.

Great storytellers achieve this by evoking familiar emotions within us but in the context of another’s life and circumstances, creating a bond between the reader and the character.

If we do that once—with one book or one character—that’s unlikely to make a difference in how we move through the world.

But if we do that 200 times, it sure as heck does.

We begin to see the character of the young boy growing up in the foster care system in the kid we see in real life struggling on the street.

We see the protagonist who struggled through a life of hardship and abuse in our seemingly difficult boss.

We wonder whether our cranky old neighbor endured the horrors of World War II that we read about in All the Light We Cannot See.

Regardless of how accurate the connections we draw in our minds are, the mere practice of unveiling that possibility has a softening effect on our natural tendency towards judgment and frustration.

It opens us, allowing us to exercise more patience and access more love for the world around us than we otherwise could.

It makes us see through each other’s flesh right to our hearts and souls.

So with that, here are some of my favorite life-altering fiction novels to leave you with: 

1. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

2. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

3. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

4. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

5. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

6. Hawaii by James A. Michener 

7. Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

8. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

9. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

10. Small Island by Andrea Levy